Peder Lund is pleased to announce its second exhibition with the Greek-American artist Lucas Samaras (b. 1936). The vastly productive sculptor, photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer and performance artist has worked in such diverse materials as Polaroid film, acrylic and oil paint, pastel, aluminium, bronze, clay, fabric, precious metals and stones, razor blades and pins. Across this large variety of media he has mastered to maintain a distinctively characteristic stylistic expression over the past six decades, regardless of contemporaneous artistic tendencies. The exhibition Lucas Samaras - Chairs and Pastels will feature a suite of pastels and three sculptural chairs. The exhibition opens 9 May and continues through 29 August 2015.

Samaras refers to his pastels as “coloured dust”, and has introduced them serially throughout his career. In the 1960s, he completed several compositions in one sitting and drew fantasy still-lives, close-ups of body parts, domestic interiors, couples and hermaphroditic nudes. He then returned to the medium in 1974 and again in 1981, when he drew more than 200 self-portraits. The nine pastels on view at Peder Lund are from the series Heads and were made between 4 July and 24 July 1981. The pastels are psychologically charged and demonstrate the importance of Samaras’ own body and mind in his art. He defamiliarises objects and depictions of himself almost obsessively, and subject matter and material are meticulously presented as dual and equally important facets of the artwork. The Heads are in sharp colours that swirl into the shape of the artist’s face, and the materiality of the crayon is seductive. The mood and psychological state of the artist in the summer of ‘81 seems part seclusive (a number of the pastels show only the artist’s right eye and nose as if hiding from the viewer); and part in a gradual state of derangement (as the month progresses the tint and the application of the crayon grow increasingly colourful and stabbing). Still, the Heads remain distanced and the artist’s various emotional states are rather manifestations of colour and form than self-biographical information. This theatricality is consistent in Samaras’ oeuvre – the viewer remains a voyeur of scenes that are strictly under the artist’s control.

On view are also two colourful stick chairs from 1989 made of painted wood and glue. Chairs have been a recurring theme for Samaras since the late 1950s. He started out by “rescuing” unoccupied chairs he found around New York City, which he prepped and photographed. In 1969, he began his Chair Transformation series (of which Chair Transformation #9 is on view), and physically transformed chairs using a wide variety of methods and materials, including mirrors, yarn, wood and bright paint. He returned to the subject in the 1980s when he constructed chairs by attaching small, found objects such as razor blades, colour pencils and kitchen utensils to armatures made out of wire. Like his Photo-Transformations, his chairs are ordinary objects transformed into something fantastical. His manipulations of visual metaphors continue to this day.

Lucas Samaras was born in Kastoria in Greece in 1936 and immigrated to New Jersey with his family in 1948. He studied under Allan Kaprow at Rutgers University and Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, and became a key figure in the Happenings in New York in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Samaras has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. His work has been represented at three editions of Documenta (1968, 1972, 1977); the Whitney Annual Exhibition (1965, 1968, 1970); and at the 1980 Venice Biennale. He represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Samaras’ work is included in more than forty public collections worldwide, including Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Samaras lives and works in New York.

The Photo-Transformations were first conceived in 1973 when Samaras began to manipulate the wet dyes of Polaroid prints before they dried.

This exhibition sheds new light on Henie Onstad Kunstsenter’s collection by focusing on the works of 15 individual artists, rather than highlighting art historical movements or –isms. Although best known for its strong focus on the Paris School painters, Cobra, as well as Norwegian and International Modernists, HOK’s collection has developed significantly over the last forty five years. Donated in 1968, the collection of 300 works—primarily prints, paintings and sculptures—has since grown to include over 4000 works, including textiles, installation, video and sound works.

The National Gallery in Oslo has this summer a major exhibition of the Swedish-Norwegian visual artist Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970). It include works from her entire oeuvre, with an emphasis on tapestries from the 1930s pertaining to her political and social engagement.

During the past few years the tapestries of Hannah Ryggen have been widely acclaimed. In 2012 six of her principal tapestries from the 1930s were exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel where they received much attention. In autumn 2013 her works will be included in the exhibition Tapis/Tapisseries at Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Recently both OCA and Kunsthall Oslo in Norway have organized shows in which Ryggen’s art has been pivotal.

Hannah Ryggen was renowned for her strong socio-political engagement and several of her tapestries appear as visual reactions to global political issues, small and big, as well as trials and incidents. A number of works deal in various ways with groups – or individuals - that are fragile, vulnerable, ostracized or condemned and from an early stage she rebelled at the horrors of fascist and Nazi movements. Themes like violence, exploitation and abuse of power are recurrent in some of her almost achromatic works from the mid 1930s.

Her approach can be associated with modern history painting in the tradition of Francisco Goya and Edouard Manet. The Spanish Civil War and the despair at the advancing Nazism and fascism are recurring themes in a number of monumental works from 1935-1938. Her strong social engagement makes us relate these tapestries to Picasso’s Guernica from 1937. Her works were widely acclaimed and some of them were exhibited at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, when Guernica was exposed for the first time.

In the 22nd July 2011 terrorist attack in Oslo, one of Ryggen’s most well known work, Vi lever på en stjerne (1958), was damaged. The tapestry was placed on the Government quarter’s main wall and is now partly restored. It certainly has not lost its expressivity. Beyond its original visual idea the work, measuring 4 x 3 meters, has now obtained the quality of a collective work of recollection. Hannah Ryggen’s body of work is furthermore characterized by a genuine craftsmanship, a desire to communicate directly with the viewer, a vigorous way of narrating as well as by a strong awareness of the distinguishing features of tapestry and the mechanism of abstraction.

The exhibition will be the first major large scale exhibition of Ryggen’s art in recent years. The project will be research-based and we will produce a catalogue with essays by several scholars within the field. As the project will be based on collaboration between the institutions involved the writers will have to be decided when the tour is settled. We hope to get together three venues of the exhibition.

The exhibition will naturally take as its point of departure the National Museum’s extensive collection of Hannah Ryggen’s works. In addition it will include important works from external public institutions as well as private owners.

Curator and responsible for the exhibition is Øystein Ustvedt at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. For further information, contact oystein.ustvedt@nasjonalmuseet.no / tel.: +47 995 26 323.